Behind the Shutter: The Untold Stories of Iconic Photographs

Have you ever looked at a photograph, a famous one, and felt like it wasn’t telling you the whole truth? Mm-hmm. I reckon every picture leaves something out. That’s the nature of a single moment caught in a box. It is. Last week we were talking about that girl with the green eyes, the Afghan Girl, and the life she lived that was a world away from the magazine cover. Well, there’s another face, a mother’s face from our own side of the water, that tells a similar story. A story of what happens after the camera goes away.

Oh, I know the one you’re fixing to talk about. The woman from the Depression, with the children hiding their faces on her shoulders. Looks like she’s carrying the weight of the whole world. The very one. Pull your chair in closer now. The rain is beating on the windows something fierce tonight. The year was nineteen thirty-six. A wet, miserable March in California. A photographer named Dorothea Lange was driving home, tired to the bone. That’s right. She’d been on the road for a month, taking pictures for the government.

Documenting the farm workers. She saw a handmade sign that said "Pea-Pickers Camp," and, you know, she just drove right on by. She was done for the day. She was. But something… something pulled at her. She said later it was like a magnet. She argued with herself for twenty miles down that muddy road. Twenty miles. And then she turned that car around. Drove back to that sign and into a camp of about twenty-five hundred starving people. Starving is the word. A freeze had come and destroyed the pea crop. There was no work. No food.

Just people huddled in tents made of rags and old tires. And in the middle of it all, she saw her. A woman in a lean-to, with her children. Florence Owens Thompson. Thirty-two years old. And Lange said she just walked up to her, like she was drawn there. She didn't ask a lot of questions. Just learned they'd been living on frozen vegetables from the fields and birds the children had killed. The woman had just sold the tires off her car to buy food. Imagine. Dorothea took out her big camera, a Graflex. She only made… what was it, Earl?

Six pictures? Six exposures in about ten minutes. That's all. She started wide, then got closer, and closer, until she got that one picture. The one we all know. The mother's face, worried, looking past the camera. The two children hiding. The baby in her lap. And here is the part of the story that the photograph can't tell you. The part that matters. Dorothea Lange never asked the woman for her name. Nope. Never did. For more than FORTY years, she was just "Migrant Mother." She was a symbol. She wasn't a person. And that picture… whoo, boy, that picture went everywhere.

It showed the whole country the face of the Great Depression. The government rushed twenty thousand pounds of food to that camp right after the pictures were published. So the picture did good. But the woman… Florence… she and her children had already moved on. They never got any of that food. They never saw a penny from that photograph, not ever. And when a reporter finally found her in the nineteen-seventies, living in a trailer park, you know what she said? She said she wished that photograph had never been taken.

Well, would you believe it. Swear on my tackle box. She said she felt ashamed of it. She said it made her family look like… like pitiful, helpless people. And they weren't. She was a proud woman, Maeve. Full-blooded Cherokee. She worked her whole life — picked cotton, worked in hospitals, whatever it took to feed her ten kids. God rest her, she sounds like half the women I knew growing up. Tough as whitethorn. So the picture that made her famous was a kind of a lie, in her mind. It was a lie of omission, I'd say. It showed her at her absolute lowest moment, and froze her there forever.

It didn't show the part where she got up the next day, and the day after that, and kept her family together through it all. And that, pet, is the God's honest truth. A photograph captures a second, but a life is made of millions of them. She wasn't just a migrant mother. She was Florence Owens Thompson. And her children said she was a fighter. That she was. When she passed on in eighty-three, her kids had a headstone made. It says: "FLORENCE LEONA THOMPSON. Migrant Mother – A Legend of the Strength of American Motherhood." Ah, now that's grand.

They gave her back her name, and her story. Sure look, what can you do. The fire's burning low. Time we were all getting to our rest.